Death Is Means To Look At Life

Until now, we could count on novelist Jim Crace to usher us into fabulist worlds of his own luxuriant imagining.

Continent and The Gift of Stones took place in pasts never encountered in our history books, Arcadia in a "future" that partook of the medieval. Quarantine placed Jesus of Nazareth in a wilderness not found on any maps. Only Signals of Distress was rooted in a definitive time and place, 19th-century Cornwall, that squared with accepted notions of "reality."

Now comes Being Dead, hell-bent on rubbing our noses in that ultimate stone-cold reality, the nowhere that follows the end of life. First you live, then you die. There is no more. We are but skin and bones that dwindle into dust. Defiant of nearly every religious tradition, the theme is vintage hard-core materialism.

Joseph and Celice, the central characters of Being Dead, are married Ph.D. zoologists, both of whom have lectured their university students about the centrality of change and decay to the study of biology. Crace's story, which takes place on the day of their murders and in the several days 30 years before, when they met as graduate students, hammers home the point that one's own death is quite another thing from death in the abstract.

Still, the author frames his novel, at start and finish, with a "quivering," a sort of traditional wake he seems to have invented. Thus Joseph and Celice are given a certain worthiness and respect, despite the assault on their dignity implicit in murder.

Being Dead is anything but a sentimental work. It is, on the contrary, a gruesome, gut-wrenching novel, not for the squeamish.

It also is a virtuoso piece of writing, with page after page filled with harsh, earthy evocation of the mini-sagas of living and dying.

Dull and drab in life, Joseph and Celice take on a garish notoriety in death.

The universe as created by Crace is ruled by chance, not God. Cruelty is casual, bereft of motive, and humankind hardly counts in the scheme of things.

Crace's innovative narrative is triply mobile. It darts between past and present. In the past, it depicts the cautious dance of Joseph and Celice's meeting and mating. In the present, it moves forward, and backward, into the earlier hours of the day before the couple skips work and heads for the beach.

Oddly enough, the effect is both starkly appalling and subtly ennobling. Only an artist of Crace's caliber -- Quarantine was a Booker finalist and Whitbread book of the year -- could pull off such a feat. For in the end we truly care about Joseph and Celice, even though the author allows only the barest glimpse into their lives.

An administrator and scientist, Joseph emerges from his colorless shell only when he breaks into song. His vibrant basso is his sole eloquence. Otherwise, he lives in fear of making a fool of himself. The young Celice demands our attention without such obvious begging. She's a bit of a flirt, an adventurer of the sexual realm, willing to take risks.

Yet a tragedy in those first few days with Joseph cripples Celice's soul. Blaming herself for a friend's death, she collapses into safe routine. Still, at home with Joseph, she remains the warrior, he the appeaser; she the social animal, he the recluse. For decades they have slept in separate beds.

Only two other characters play a role in this tightly focused story. Just by showing up, the couple's twentysomething daughter, Syl, heightens the poignance of their demise. An education-despising, self-absorbed rebel, she makes her parents look like saints. And a ghoulish clerk at the local morgue, where Syl goes looking for her missing parents, adds a further dash of noir. He may or may not be her parents' murderer.

Emblazoned on the gravestones in many cemeteries of colonial New England were the words "Memento Mori." This reminder of mortality was a caution to Christians who might stray and end up in hell.

Crace's Being Dead is a bracing contemporary memento mori: Your time is short. Make the most of it.